


last frontier

by seek_its_opposite



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alaska, Episode: s01e08 Ice, F/M, Ice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-06-27
Packaged: 2018-07-18 14:07:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7318279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seek_its_opposite/pseuds/seek_its_opposite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not who she was before, soft flannel edges bunched in anxious palms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	last frontier

**i. sky**

“Hey Scully, did you know the Alaska state motto is ‘North to the future’?” 

“Did you come up with it?” 

He looks up from his magazine, the blue of the glossy two-dimensional glacier sinking in his wide eyes. She can see him treading the edge in her voice. It’s the fourth flight of their trip and not their last, but it might be their last something: last bag of oversalted peanuts, last window seat for him to make a show of stealing when they both know he’s doing her a favor, last time a commercial flight ever seems to her like the worst possible way to cut across the clouds. The closer you come to falling off the top of the world, the less you notice turbulence. She grips the armrest to mark the last stand of ordinary fear. 

“Do you know the story of the Alaska state flag?”

She shuts her eyes, waits for him to tell her. He reads. 

“ _The Alaska state flag was chosen in a 1927 contest. Alaska Native Benny Benson, age 13, beat out 700 other entries_ "—he draws out the 700—" _from children in grades 7 through 12 with his design, which was inspired by the constellation he looked for every night from the window of the orphanage he called home_. I like this kid, Scully. _Benson wrote, ‘The blue field is for the Alaska sky and the forget-me-not, an Alaskan flower. The North Star is for the future state of Alaska, the most northerly in the union. The Dipper is for the Great Bear—symbolizing strength._ ’”

It’s a sunless grey outside their window, but the coat squeezed haphazardly under the seat in front of him is lined in deep blue. She thinks it might mean something that he keeps his sky hidden. 

“My father showed me how to navigate using Polaris,” she offers. 

“Retired Navy Captain, right?” 

She had forgotten that she told him but isn’t surprised that he remembers. When his mind trains on her it’s like being a slide in a microscope, exposed but lit from within. She shouldn’t like it, but it’s warm and she does. 

“He took me down to the docks on clear nights and told me that maps might change, but true north never would. ‘Starbuck’s North Star.’ He did that every time we moved.” 

“Have you ever gotten lost?” 

His profile is uncharted territory. “Not yet.”

They fill out the crossword puzzle until the wheels touch down in Nome. He takes creative liberties. There is no five-letter word for the cool of the wire rim of his glasses when he lets her try them on and she laughs, pushing them off her nose with her cheeks. They have almost identical prescriptions.

He pulls her bag from the overhead compartment, hands it to her, flashes an iceberg smile. “North to the future.”

“You have to admit, it does sound like something you’d say.”

“I don’t think the future is a single direction on a compass.”

She falls in step behind him and wonders if it isn’t.   

 

**ii. forget-me-not**

The door is too loud and the latch somehow louder, a gavel ringing out a verdict she’d like to take back. _In here I’ll be safer than you_. She believes him, whether he’s infected or not. She’d rather chance dying with him than living without him.

He can’t be. He might be. She’ll save him.

She almost opens the industrial-strength door again, to say—what? _Mulder, is it you? Mulder, when you look at me, do you have any urge to kill me? Mulder, when I look at you, sometimes I think I have the urge to kiss you. Mulder._

For someone who’s been given so little space, she likes the way his name fills a room. Her fingers are tapping a rhythm against the painted metal door before she realizes what it is: Paula Abdul, “Straight Up.” It was playing at their gate in Anchorage. She suspects music takes a little while longer to reach Alaska. Time delay. She can work with that. _If you are all that you seem..._

She hopes he can hear her.

 

**iii. dipper**

His hands dig into her shoulders and she gasps, heart in her feet. She made a mistake. The worm is past his spinal cord already—it’s in the hypothalamus, in his beautiful microscope brain, and she’s more afraid of that than she is of dying. If they cure him, what will he think? Another one lost on his watch. She almost tells him not to blame himself.

But he moves like a benediction. His fingers bleed reassurance into the roots of her hair, red on red; he touches her behind the ear, and she doesn’t have to see him to know that he still just wants to trust her. Have they always been like this? She thinks that needing someone so completely might be an X-File, the first she’ll grant without reservation.

_We are not who we are._

This is not who she was before, soft flannel edges bunched in anxious palms. A worm that changes the chemical makeup of the brain has never been her reality. But that might as well be this job, rewiring her brain, reframing the possible. She is not who she is but they are who they are: two people who save themselves by saving each other. He brushes the hair from her neck and rests his whole hand there, and she decides that the next time she cuts her hair, she’ll go shorter in the back.

She can feel his fingers curved around her neck after they’re gone, and she doesn’t want to lose them, so she doesn’t move. He doesn’t ask her to. A perfect, infinite stalemate contained in however long it takes the writing on the clipboard in front of her to start making sense.

“Mulder, they’re going to come in here,” she whispers to the clipboard. Mulder puts his hand on her shoulder and reaches for the door. 

When they tell her later that they torched the place, she knows where the fire started.

 

**iv. north star**

Four and a half years later, she’s back on ice, a preserved specimen. One of these days she’s sure she’ll stay dead. But he’s breathing in her lap and she thinks that as long as he does she’ll come back to life a hundred times, for him and because of him. They are who they are.

“North to the future,” he shivers into the sleeve of her jacket. His jacket. Lined in blood red. She brushes the hair from his eyes.

If she knew where she was, where they’d taken her, she might tell him that almost everything was north from here, and he’d say _Exactly, exactly_.


End file.
